This article starts the beginning of a series on Christian theology and topics relevant to the Christian faith. Highly influenced by my pastor’s weekly Bible studies and their sermons and the various Christian authors and apologists I have read over the years to which I own unquestionable gratitude: St Thomas Aquinas, Bill Bennett, GK Chesterton, Francis Collins, Timothy Keller, Kelly Monroe Kullberg, CS Lewis, Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, Thomas Oden, John Ortberg, Hugh Ross, Geoffrey Simons, George Weigel, Phillip Yancy, and Ravi Zacharias.
At the center of life, lie four questions of origin, morality, meaning, and destiny. The answers to each of these four questions must be established as true by its correspondence to reality and all the answers, when put together, must cohere without contradiction. The world’s religions each answer these questions differently despite today’s secular culture that says all religions are essentially the same. In fact, all religions are the same except for their understanding of the character of God, of the cosmology and meaning of the universe, of human nature and value, of ethics, the good life, charity and kindness, sexuality, suffering, joy, hope, salvation and our eternal destination. Without revelation, conscience, and reason, life and our reality is reduced to a series of pains, pleasures, and power struggles.
Every life is built fundamentally and finally on one’s view of God. Even what a society thinks about God matters as do their culture of ideas. Both have consequences. In the past century, our society was influenced by reductionists, materialists, and relativists like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Their ideas bore within themselves their own seeds of destruction but not without costing millions of lives. Atheist, totalitarian regimes (communism, fascism, and Nazism) killed more of their own citizens, 100+ million, than all the people that have died in all the wars of mankind. From a strictly atheistic point of view, there can be nothing but material determinism. This view turns the Golden Rule upside down, “whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”
ORIGIN
Amazingly, not only does the bible correctly describe the major events in the creation of life on earth, but places those events in the scientifically correct order and properly identified the earth’s initial conditions. Not only in Genesis but also in Isaiah and the Psalms I are found accurate descriptions of how the universe is continually expanding, of its beginning in space and time, how it is getting older and colder- concepts scientists didn’t even begin to comprehend until the twentieth century. Only the bible leaped beyond the dimensions of length, width, height and time. Only the bible successfully predicted future scientific discoveries. Only the bible accurately described the cosmic origin and the fine-tuned nature of the universe and the solar system. If you analyze the probability of all the fine-tuning factors in the universe and our solar system required to create and sustain life, there is much less than a 1 chance in 10 to 138th power (thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion) exists that even one such planet would occur anywhere in the universe. This is the cosmological proof of the existence of God. With Earth’s ability to sustain life, Darwinian explanation of humans and other life forms needs to be addressed. There are several examples of cellular functions that could not have been formed gradually by any natural process, including cilium, vision, blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process. Other examples of irreducible complexity include aspects of DNA reduplication, electron transport, telomere synthesis, photosynthesis, transcription regulation and more. It is impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Cambrian explosion, which all major animal phyla appeared suddenly, might be the best example of fiat miracle. Biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford claim, “The production of a new animal species in nature has yet to be documented.”
MORALITY
Moral relativism puts forth two arguments regarding the lack of objective morality- culture and individual differences and tolerance. Relativists’ argument, taken to its logical conclusions, claims that there is no moral distinction amongst societies for cannibalism, genital mutilation, infanticide, torture, racism or genocide. That a society’s culture is its morals. Continuing with this logic would make any individual that attempted to change a society immoral such as Martin Luther King. Yet the relativist dogmatically asserts that there is no moral truth.
Evolution is inadequate for explaining the existence of moral norms since it doesn’t explain our care for the weak, sick, elderly, or genetically marred that do not advance the “survival of the fittest.” The source of morality must be the sort of being who has the moral authority to enforce universal moral norms. Therefore, the source of moral authority must be a self-existent, perfectly good being whose realm of authority is the entire universe. It seems fitting to call such a being “God”. If God exists, moral realism is natural. But in an atheistic universe, objective morality- along with its assumptions of human dignity, rights, and moral responsibility- is unnatural, surprising, and odd.
MEANING
Secularism has been unable to lift us out of consumer materialism and the idolatry of image, competition, and success. In contrast, the distillation of the Sermon on the Mount is absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love. In knowing a loving God, we find purpose of human existence, and that in experiencing his love expressed in Jesus Christ, we find hope for life.
DESTINY
Some argue that there are many paths up the mountain but that assumes our ability to climb. Given our imperfections (sin) and the inevitability of death, we find that only one person made a path down the mountain, from the top, to love us. Jesus Christ’s gospel tells us that we are moral beings made for his purpose and our moral choices are based on his character and our destiny is to live in eternity with him.
IN SUMMARY
Christianity is not a philosophy but a religion; it rests first of all not on human reason but on divine revelation. Christians have not reasoned their way into each of their beliefs, nor do they base their beliefs on their own experiences, whether mystical or human feelings. Rather, they base them on authority- the authority of God himself, the God who took on human flesh in Christ and who commissioned his apostles to teach in his name and with his authority, to perpetuate the church Christ founded, and to write the Scriptures, the New Testament, and to communicate Christ to all generations.
The atonement of the God-man distinguishes Christianity from all other religions. Why did Christ die for us? The answer is grace, for our salvation, unmerited love that begins with God and ends with God. God does not simply act lovingly. He is love (I John 4:8). One does not do anything to obtain salvation; one simply believes. This is God’s grace and it is truly amazing.